Dark Mirror bak-10

by Barry Maitland

  ‘So it wasn’t Keith here who hit you?’

  ‘No.’ Ogilvie raised his chin defiantly. ‘I told you that before.’

  ‘What did this man look like?’

  ‘Him.’ He pointed a chubby finger at the photographs. ‘That’s him, the same man. In his late forties perhaps, with grizzled hair. A Londoner by his accent. A very tough character. That’s what persuaded me to tell you, when Keith showed me these pictures. Now you can do something about it. Only, I’ll need protection. If they ever find out I’ve spoken to you…’

  ‘We can’t prosecute this man for attacking you without your evidence, Nigel.’

  ‘No! I don’t want that. Keith said…’ He looked anxiously at Rafferty. ‘He said it would help you, if I told you this, with your main case, Marion’s murder. That’s all I want.’

  ‘And you’ve done that, Nigel. Good lad.’ Rafferty patted him on the shoulder. ‘Now piss off.’

  Ogilvie scrambled to his feet, ducked his head and made off. Kathy looked back at his departing figure and caught a glimpse of the face of the other customer at the bar, before he shifted away behind his paper. Brendan Crouch, Rafferty’s partner in crime.

  She turned back to Rafferty. ‘You don’t expect me to believe that, do you? We caught you on camera at the library at the time he was attacked.’

  ‘Yeah, I was there, but I didn’t do it. Fact is, I knew Warrender. I happened to see him with Marion one day, in the West End, having a drink together, all very cosy. I thought, what’s she doing with an old bloke like that? It’s not right. I was thinking of Sheena, see? How she’d feel about it. So I kept an eye on them, and when she left I spoke to him, asked him what his game was. You’ve spoken to him, have you? Smooth bugger, yeah? He told me that they were just good friends, but to keep it to myself, slipped me a few quid and said he might be able to put a bit of work my way. That’s why I was at the library that day. He asked me to meet another guy at the back entrance to lend a hand to pick up some merchandise from someone inside. I was to make sure the negotiations weren’t disturbed. Only I got held up in traffic and I was late. By the time I got there it was all over. I heard the fuss and scarpered.’

  He saw the doubt on Kathy’s face and leaned closer, dropping his voice, his breath beery. ‘Listen, I’m just trying to be helpful, okay?’ He tapped the photographs. ‘I don’t know who this guy is. Maybe he’s nothing to do with Warrender. Maybe you can’t use it. But I could be more helpful.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Maybe I could arrange for arsenic to be found in Warrender’s car, or on his clothes. Would that help?’

  Kathy looked thoughtful, reached for Ogilvie’s glass and took out the plastic cocktail stick. It had a sharp point, for spearing cherries or slices of lemon. She brought it down on the back of Rafferty’s hand, not quite hard enough to puncture the skin. He blanched and his head jerked back, his hand still pinned by the spike.

  ‘Rafferty, if you so much as think of doing anything so stupid, I’ll have you locked away forever. I’m not interested in your lies. I want the truth.’

  She tossed the stick back in the glass.

  Rafferty rubbed his hand, his eyes sliding over to his partner at the bar. ‘Fuck you. The truth is that Warrender had Marion killed. We both know that.’

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t know why, but he did. Maybe she got too greedy, or wanted him to leave his wife, the usual crap. He tried to make it look like suicide, didn’t he? Fucking weird way to do it, if you ask me. But he’s a scary guy, underneath that smooth suit. I reckon he wanted her to suffer, and for her to know that. And he’s smart and rich. You won’t catch him easily.’

  ‘What about Tony da Silva? You know him too, don’t you?’

  ‘Her tutor? Yeah, he contacted me, trying to find out where Marion had moved to. Said it was urgent academic business. Oh yeah, sure.’ He pulled a face.

  ‘What do you think it was?’

  ‘Well, he fancied her, didn’t he? And she wasn’t having any.’

  ‘So maybe he killed her.’

  ‘Nah. Doesn’t have the balls. And he didn’t know where she lived. Not until afterwards.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I told him eventually, after she was dead.’

  ‘Yes, he said you gave him a key. Is that right?’

  ‘Not so as I’d admit it. He phoned me at the weekend, wanting me to tell you, confirm it was after she died. I said forget it.’

  ‘Of course he could just be using you to disguise the fact that he did know where she lived.’

  Rafferty thought about that, then shook his head.

  Kathy gathered up the photos. ‘If we can’t identify these I’ll get you to come in to look at some mugshots. Assuming this isn’t just some bloke going for a drink.’

  She got to her feet and walked out.

  •

  When she got back to the office she tried without success to find a match for the man in the photographs. In the end she sent them off to technical support to have them enhanced, and by the next morning she had a reasonably clear large image of his face pinned up on the board, still none the wiser as to his identity. None of the others recognised him, until Bren came in, sniffling and red-nosed, sucking throat lozenges.

  ‘What’s Harry been up to then?’ he rasped as he passed the picture.

  ‘You know him?’ Kathy asked. ‘I haven’t been able to find him in records.’

  ‘He’s not a crook, he’s a cop, or used to be. DS Harry Sykes, retired about four years ago.’

  ‘Know what he does now?’

  ‘I can probably find out.’

  After making a couple of phone calls he came back with the information that Sykes was now working for a West End brokerage by the name of Mallory Capital. twenty-eight

  T he prince closed the file with a sigh. It had a very smart cover, gold embossed, which he liked, but the contents were impenetrable-bear spreads, cliquets, vanilla options-what did he know of such things? He just wanted to spend the bloody money. ‘Might one smoke, Douglas? One never can tell these days.’

  ‘Of course, Ricky. I’ll get you an ashtray.’

  As he passed the window Warrender glanced down into the street and saw a police car double-parked outside the front door. He gave a little frown, then noticed a solitary man in the central gardens of the square. The figure was clad in a long black coat, with a shock of white hair at its head, and was standing motionless, apparently looking straight up at him. Then the man took a hand from his overcoat pocket and lifted it to his ear. Almost immediately, as if by magic, he heard a telephone begin to ring in the outer office. When the buzzer sounded on his desk, Warrender was almost expecting it.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Warrender, only it’s the police. They say it’s urgent. A Detective Chief Inspector Brock. I tried to tell him…’

  ‘It’s all right, Carol. I’ll speak to him. And get Harry to bring the car round to the front, will you?’

  ‘I’m not sure I can. The girls downstairs just told me that he’s been arrested.’

  ‘What’s an iron butterfly again, Douglas?’ There was more than a hint of frustration in the prince’s voice.

  ‘It’s the four-option strategy, Ricky, with three consecutively higher strike prices and a long or short straddle in the middle. Look, I might get Jason to come and talk you through the technical steps again, okay?’

  ‘It’s just that Daddy will expect me to know what it’s all about,’ the prince grumbled.

  ‘Of course. Just excuse me one moment.’

  He went out and spoke to his secretary, then took the call at her desk. ‘Hello? Warrender here.’

  ‘DCI Brock, Mr Warrender. I need to talk to you, concerning Marion Summers’ death.’

  ‘Yes, well… later this afternoon perhaps.’

  ‘This won’t wait. I’m outside in the square. We can talk here if you wish, or go up to West End Central.’

 
; When Warrender crossed the street into the gardens he saw that Brock had seated himself on the bench near the statue, where, he knew, Marion had taken her lunch, fifteen days before.

  ‘Did she always choose this seat?’ Brock asked.

  ‘Unless someone else got here first.’

  ‘So that you could see her, from your office?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you might have looked out and watched her sip the poisoned drink.’

  ‘Except that I was in Corsica that day, and she knew it.’

  ‘Did you arrange to have it done?’

  ‘Certainly not. Is that why you’ve arrested my driver?’

  ‘He’s not under arrest. He’s helping us with our inquiries. We have a witness who claims that he tried to obtain arsenic on your behalf.’

  ‘What? That’s absolute rubbish. What witness?’

  ‘The witness has also suggested that your relationship with Marion had become impossible, her demands too great.’

  ‘Well,’ Warrender replied coolly, ‘that just shows how ill-informed your so-called witness is.’

  ‘All the same, it happened at a time when you were faced with a major disruption in your life, weren’t you? Were you really ready for the rupture it would cause, with your wife, your daughter, perhaps your mother? The loss of the house you’ve shared with them all those years? The gossip in your professional circles? Were you ready for all that? To take on a child again, mewling and puking and keeping you awake half the night?’

  ‘You sound as if you’re talking from experience. I have one very considerable advantage over my first efforts to start a family-I can now afford to outsource most of the difficulties. Marion made me feel thirty years younger. I looked forward to it as the start of a new life.’

  Brock was watching Warrender carefully all through this, measuring his answers, trying to gauge his credibility.

  ‘Weren’t you just a little concerned by that-how shall I put it?-that rather obsessive side of Marion’s character? Her ruthless need to be recognised, at all costs?’

  ‘You’re speculating. You didn’t know her. Look, didn’t you read the contents of the memory stick I gave your inspector at the weekend? If you’re that desperate for a culprit, there are a few clues there, I should have thought.’

  ‘Yes, but apparently you didn’t give us the original memory stick that belonged to Marion. According to our experts, each of the items has been recorded onto its memory within the last week, and we can’t be sure when they were originally written, or by whom. The whole thing could be a fabrication, made for the purpose of feeding us false leads, which, as you say, point away from you.’

  Warrender sucked in his breath. ‘The original contained some other things, intimate things, that I wasn’t prepared to show you. I thought that even if I deleted them your people might be able to retrieve them. I couldn’t risk that, and so I transferred the items I was prepared to share with you to a new stick and destroyed the old one. But the entries are all genuine, believe me. And as far as I can see they point in only one conceivable direction-her tutor, da Silva. Rereading those letters, those notes of hers, I feel very angry now that I didn’t see the signs; her instinctive revulsion towards him, the way he attempted to pursue her, and how she fell ill and lost the baby after finally agreeing to see him.’

  Warrender sat on the edge of the bench, fists clenched, and his voice dropped. ‘And most of all, the way she was killed. Arsenic, for God’s sake! Don’t you find that just too damn symbolic and… and. .. anachronistic for anyone living in the real world? Sounds to me like the ultimate academic put-down.’

  ‘You know Dr da Silva’s close friend at the university, Dr Colin Ringland, don’t you?’

  Warrender looked up sharply. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘You’re mentioned on the website of his research unit.’

  ‘Oh, the consultative committee. Yes, I do know him, although he has no idea that I was involved with Marion. But you’re thinking, “Dr Ringland equals arsenic”, yes? Well believe me, I’ve been nowhere near his laboratory during the time I’ve known Marion. My connection with Colin Ringland goes back four or five years, and arose out of my father’s will.’

  ‘I think you’d better explain that.’

  ‘My father was with the diplomatic service for many years, mostly in the Indian sub-continent. I was born out there, and we all had a tremendous affection for the place. We returned to the UK in the sixties, and then my father took a post with UNICEF in New York, where he particularly focused on their programs in Bengal and Bangladesh, which he knew well. One of his most ambitious projects was to bring clean drinking water to that area, because illness and death from contaminated water were widespread. He initiated the tubewell program, to tap clean aquifers deep below the surface. UNICEF financed the sinking of almost a million such wells, and the immediate health improvements were dramatic. Unfortunately, no one had any idea that the deep water was contaminated with naturally occurring arsenic. It took many years for its insidious effects to become apparent, and when the scale of the problem began to be realised there was some panic, scapegoats were sought. This was long after my father had retired, but a group of activists identified him as the main culprit and attempted to bring a case against him in the American courts. Things got out of hand. He was actually accused of being a murderer at one point. Quite absurd. It was all very tragic and he was devastated. He died before it was resolved, and left a provision in his will to establish a trust fund to sponsor research into solutions to the problems of groundwater contamination. I am now the chairman of that trust, and one of our principal beneficiaries for the past couple of years has been Dr Ringland and his research team. So naturally I’m acquainted with him, and meet him at several progress reviews each year.

  ‘You know, many of the people in Bangladesh who have suffered from the poisoning of the tubewells regard it as fate, of a particularly cruel kind, as if there had been a curse upon them and the whole enterprise from the start. And it has occurred to me that Marion’s death could be seen as a vicious extension of that fate. Without the tubewells there would have been no research program at the university, and without Dr Ringland’s research program, his friend da Silva would have had no access to arsenic with which to murder Marion and Tina.’

  •

  ‘Did you believe him?’ Kathy asked.

  Brock scratched his beard. ‘Both he and Harry Sykes have solid alibis for the time of Tina’s poisoning, and both were a lot more convincing than Rafferty. What’s his game, anyway? Does he think there’s a reward?’

  ‘I think,’ Kathy said slowly, ‘that he may be hoping to get his hands on Marion’s house.’

  ‘Really? How did he work that out? I wouldn’t have thought he was smart enough.’

  ‘I suggested to his wife, Sheena, that Warrender might lose his claim on the place if he was implicated in Marion’s death.’

  Brock looked sharply at her. ‘Ah, did you indeed?’

  ‘We wanted to shake them up.’

  He gave a growl and she braced herself for a bollocking. But after a moment he shook his head and said, a little too calmly, ‘I think this case has become a bit personal for you, Kathy. I can understand your distaste for both Rafferty and Warrender, but it seems to me, on any objective measure, that Tony da Silva is still our prime suspect. Damn it, he has no alibi for the first murder and was actually at the scene of the second. He had access to arsenic at his friend Ringland’s laboratory, and he had a powerful motive-Marion was about to destroy his career. I think maybe we’re being too clever by half. We’ll have him in again, and do it the slow way, bit by bit, again and again, until we find the cracks.’

  •

  Sophie Warrender answered Kathy’s knock, her mood very different from when Kathy had last seen her. She looked drawn and worried, her forehead furrowed by lines that hadn’t been apparent before.

  ‘She says she wants to see you,’ Sophie said, ‘but she’s not at all well, so
please be careful. It seemed to hit her on Friday, the day after Tina died. She’s hardly eaten a thing since then, or come out of her room. You’ll see the change in her. I’ve had the doctor look at her twice and he’s quite concerned. I even thought she might have been poisoned herself that day without realising it and was suffering the after-effects, but the doctor says not.’

  Emily was sitting in her mother’s office, curled up in a corner of a chesterfield sofa, a thick woollen cardigan over her shoulders although the room was very warm. She did look diminished, her eyes large and red-rimmed in her pale elfin face. She had an old leather-bound volume on her knee, gripped in slender white fingers.

  ‘Emily’s been digging about in her grandfather’s collection up in the belvedere, haven’t you, dear?’ Sophie’s bright, encouraging tone sounded strained. ‘What have you got?’

  Emily raised the book wordlessly for her mother to see.

  ‘Wilkie Collins, yes, well… We call it the belvedere’-she pointed to the spiral stair leading up into the Italianate tower visible from the street-‘because it was originally open, but Dougie’s father had it enclosed and turned it into his private library, his refuge.’ She seemed momentarily at a loss, then said, ‘Can I get you some tea, Inspector?’

  ‘That would be lovely, thanks.’

  ‘Right.’ She looked doubtfully at her daughter, then said, ‘Shan’t be a moment.’

  Kathy sat on the sofa, turning to face the girl. ‘Thanks for agreeing to see me again, Emily. I know it’s not easy, especially if you’re not feeling well.’

  ‘I want to help if I can.’ Her voice was barely a whisper.

  ‘Have you remembered anything else about that day at the British Library? Maybe noticing anyone at the cafe?’

  Emily shook her head, a loop of auburn hair dropping over an eye. ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Maybe you could take me through exactly what you did with Tina, that would have been on the Tuesday, when we met at Marion’s house, then on Wednesday and Thursday?’

  Kathy took notes as Emily haltingly described agreeing to help Tina on the Tuesday, then on the following day going around several libraries with Tina and Donald Fotheringham, trying to establish what Marion had been doing.